Four days after the murder trial of Lindsay Clancy ended without a verdict, jurors are beginning to describe the impasse that left the panel unable to reach a unanimous decision.
The jury foreperson said one of the 12 jurors remained the sole obstacle to agreement, even after he allegedly conceded during deliberations that reasonable doubt existed.
“He admitted he had reasonable doubt, and I started filling out the forms—I was so excited,” she told NBC10 Boston in a Sept. 8 interview. “There were three forms I had to fill out, and I started filling them out. I wrote my signature on each one. And then, he said, ‘But I’m still not gonna say that she’s not guilty by reason of insanity.’”
Another juror, speaking to the same outlet, described the holdout as “very arrogant” and said he appeared unwilling to seriously consider the views or evidence raised by others in the room.
“He tried to ask a question about the medications, and we went back to the report from South Shore Hospital. We had the toxicology report. We could see exactly the amounts,” she said. “The nurses [who were on the jury] spoke to that…that specific thing. That was a question that he had, and he just completely disregarded the information that they gave him.”
A third juror described the restless tension in the room over the days-long impasse.
“Every one of us in the hours of our frustration, would get up and walk the room—because you just couldn’t sit anymore—and would all go to the cart with the exhibits,” she explained. “He, I think, got up to the cart once, very briefly, and went back to his seat. He would not interact with us.”
“We read to him on numerous occasions the definition of reasonable doubt from Judge Sullivan’s instruction,” the same juror added. “He actually said one day, in the end, ‘Well, why don’t we have the judge come in and read it again?’ And we were like, ‘No, we have it in front of us. We don’t need that.’ We would highlight it [and say]: ‘This is the definition of reasonable doubt,’ but he had the hardest time getting off the fact that Lindsay viciously killed her children.”
The jury room’s conflict over the definition of reasonable doubt spilled out into the courtroom on Sept. 3, when the foreperson submitted a note to Judge William Sullivan on the matter.
In response, Sullivan individually sidebarred with each juror, reemphasized to the group the rules he’d given them about reasonable doubt and asked them to resume their deliberations.
“I want to remind you,” he said, “that you are required to follow my instructions on the law as I gave them to you.”
Afterward, Clancy’s defense attorney Kevin Reddington argued that the judge’s approach was not sufficient. He requested inquiry into the juror—and moved for them to be dismissed.
Sullivan did not remove the juror, noting that the discharge of a member of the jury mid-deliberation is “a sensitive undertaking.”
“I don’t feel that it is proper for me to side with one side or the other of the deliberations,” he explained. “I don’t feel it’s appropriate for me to say I agree with one juror or 11.”
One day later, the judge declared a mistrial after the jury informed him they still could not come to an agreement.
“It is with a heavy heart that we report,” Sullivan read aloud from their final note, “that we’re unable to come to a unanimous decision and will not be able to.”
As of the time of publication, the holdout juror has not publicly identified himself or spoken on the deliberations.
Clancy had been on trial for three counts of first-degree murder over the deaths of her and ex-husband Patrick Clancy’s three young children: Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and Callan, 8 months old. While the prosecution argued the mother deliberately and intentionally killed her three children, her defense team contended that she was suffering from postpartum psychosis at the time of the killings and therefore could not be held criminally responsible.